IN an appeal to its Freethought constituency the Truth Seeker says:—
We cannot afford to have any more religious legislation by Congress. Already too many precedents have been established. This country was dedicated to freedom, and it was decreed that Church and State should be separate. It cannot be denied by any honest and intelligent person that the ship of State is rapidly drifting from her secular moorings out into the rock-torn waters of ecclesiasticism. We must at once bring her back to her safe anchorage or meet wreck and death in the near future.
But we shall have more religious legislation by Congress. Eighteen hundred years ago the prophet of God foretold that in this country would be formed an image to the papal beast. This has been done. The Government has surrendered to the united churches; the power is now in the hands of a religious hierarchy as relentless as ever Rome was—a hierarchy that has boasted that it holds the Congress of the United States in its hands—and it now only remains for it to fulfill the remainder of the prophecy of Revelation 13:15-17. The Truth Seeker does not believe the word of God, but it cannot deny the facts as they unfold. Our contemporary thinks the rising tide of governmental ecclesiasticism will yet be stayed by a revival of the love of liberty now latent in the American breast; but it is a vain hope. Only the power of God can break the hold that apostate Protestantism and Roman Catholicism has on this fair land, and that power will not be put forth until the time comes for the fulfillment of the promise of the Father to the Lord Jesus Christ: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for then inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.” [31]